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This camera will blow your mind

The camera will wrap around any surface.

Researchers have just discovered a way to create an amazing camera that can wrap around any surface.

The applications would be unending: you could wrap it around a streetlight to get a 360-degree view of an area, or use it as a wallpaper. Researchers at Columbia University were able to create a new thin flexible sheet camera recently that can do exactly that, although it’s still in prototype phase, according to a university statement.

Shree Nayar, professor of computer science at Columbia and the lead researcher, said that the team was trying to find ways to capture visual info in “unconventional” ways. Spreading a camera out like paper with material properties similar to that of fabric or paper would allow users to wrap it around just about anything.

And he also sees the possibility of creating a flexible sheet camera about the size of a credit card, with the camera on one side and the imaging display on the other.

“Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space,” Nayar said in the statement. “While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging. We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible.”

He added: “The adaptive lens array we have developed is an important step towards making the concept of flexible sheet cameras viable. The next step will be to develop large-format detector arrays to go with the deformable lens array. The amalgamation of the two technologies will lay the foundation for a new class of cameras that expand the range of applications that benefit from imaging.”